You're conflating the protracted promises for full-self-driving with the current rollout of autonomous driving features in Teslas, a feature people are using today. I've driving with multiple people who use their Tesla self-driving and report its quality/accuracy, this isn't some overpromised future feature.

And I mean, it's not like Anthropic is a zero-product company that is only offering gated access to their only product, Opus 4.7/4.8 are very good and are driving billions in revenue. Anyone can use it and see how good it is, and it is clear that it is a very good model at many things. It is no huge leap to imagine that a model that is 10x bigger is also better at many of the tasks that Opus is good at.

They are gating the release because of cybersecurity/misuse concerns, which makes sense because

1. Existing models are already being used to find exploits and hack into systems

2. We don't know the effects of releasing a tool which can autonomously exploit systems, especially in a world driven by a "security through obscurity" philosophy. It makes sense to give a heads-up to patch up software that affects billions of users before releasing it.

Imagining that this delayed rollout is all a big marketing scheme, that they have gotten dozens of multi-national companies to play along, and that Anthropic is somehow now just patently being dishonest about something while they have every incentive to not be dishonest (especially when they are neck and neck with OpenAI and their relative success depends on verified claims about model abilities), is pure conspiratorial thinking and driving more by a motivated cynicism about AI companies rather than a reasoned examination of the claims being made.